maybe that will be fixed tonight with this thing they're going to do with turning off one of the mics when the other is talking. should biden adjust to the way trump behaved in debate one? >> yes, absolutely. the one thing i would do if i were in the vice president's shoes is pace myself. let trump get it out of his system. the more he shows his behind, the better it is for you to come in over the top as reasonable, solid, speaking to the american people. don't try to do the engage thing, don't take the bait on hunter. i know it's your son. don't take the bait. hit it one time and move on because everything after that is gratuitous. so the reality for trump is, he's going to try, instead of doing what i said before, convince americans to reelect him, he's going to try to draw biden into the murky quagmire of his soup. the reality for biden is, i'm not doing that, america, this is what i need you to know in the last two weeks of this campaign, and why you need to vote for me

for president. and i think if he does that, he'll get by all this crazy tonight on his way to an election two weeks from this past tuesday, and then getting a transition to become president. >> michael steele, i don't know if you heard the "oh, bleep" from republicans in congress that i heard when the world series ad for joe biden debuted and it was clear that joe biden is running as an american president. he's running as though he has the job of healing the country, repairing our economy by healing sick americans and sick towns and sick counties and bringing the country together even if they don't agree with him, by highlighting the endorsement of cindy in the name of her late husband, john mccain, running as the bigger man. what do you think the forecasts are for the senate majority and the numbers in the house? >> i think it's tough. i think no one understood what a lot of us were trying to say

six, eight, nine, ten months ago about tethering themselves so closely to donald trump in what was obviously a toxic environment, made more so by his absolute abject failure to address covid-19. their silence, their complicity, has now come back home to nestle right around their ankles. they can't get off of it, they can't move away from it. and the american voter is looking at them the same way they look at trump, as a disappointment. and they're ready to make a change. >> michael steele, former republican party chairman, now adviser to the lincoln project, wouldn't be the same without you. we are about one minute away. i realize we've been talking a lot about what we expect trump to do, and what biden ought to do. >> right. >> i'm really -- a lot of anticipation for me is whether or not biden is going to go hard at trump on the chinese finances story that was in "the new york times." the president has a secret,

previously undisclosed chinese bank account and in his first year in office managed to get, hmm, $25 million in cash out of china including chinese government-linked sources. if the democratic side wants to be on offense here, there's plenty to be on offense about that isn't even just about his record as president, that's about the corruption side. >> and obama had the killer line, he said, if that happened to me, fox news would be calling me beijing barry. >> and there's the fairness argument, that donald trump pays no taxes, he pays more taxes to china than the united states, he still gets $100,000 worth of health care and he's still trying to take your health care. there's fundamental fairness argument that donald trump is the elite who is getting all these benefits and giving you y nothing. >> we're at the start of the final debate of the 2020 election season. here we go. >> good evening from belmont university in nashville, tennessee. i'm kristen welker of nbc news. and i welcome you to the final

2020 presidential debate between president donald j. trump and former vice president joe biden. tonight's debate is sponsored by the commission on presidential debates. it is conducted under health and safety protocols designed by the commission's health security adviser. the audience here in the hall has promised to remain silent. no cheers, boos, or other interruptions except right now as we welcome to the stage former vice president joe biden and president donald j. trump. [ applause ] and i do want to say a very good evening to both of you. this debate will cover six major topics. at the beginning of each

section, each candidate will have two minutes uninterrupted to answer my first question. the debate commission will then turn on their microphone only when it is their turn to answer. and the commission will turn it off exactly when the two minutes have expired. after that, both microphones will be remain on but on behalf of the voters, i'm going to ask you to please speak one at a time. the goal is for you to hear each other and for the american people to hear every word of what you both have to say. and so with that, if you're ready, let's start. and we will begin with the fight against the coronavirus. president trump, the first question is for you. the country is heading into a dangerous new phase. more than 40,000 americans are in the hospital tonight with covid, including record numbers here in tennessee. and since the two of you last shared a stage, 16,000 americans have died from covid. so please be specific. how would you lead the country during this next stage of the coronavirus crisis? two minutes, uninterrupted. >> so as you know, 2.2 million

people modelled out were expected to die. we closed up the greatest economy in the world in order to fight this horrible disease that came from china. it's a worldwide pandemic. it's all over the world. you see the spikes in europe. and many other places right now. if you notice, the mortality rate is down 85%. uh, the excess mortality rate is way down, and much lower than almost any other country. and we're fighting it. and we're fighting it hard. there is a spike, there was a spike in florida, and it's now gone. there was a very big spike in texas, it's now gone. there was a very big spike in arizona, it's now gone. and there are some spikes and surges in other places. they will soon be gone. we have a vaccine that's coming. it's ready. it's going to be announced within weeks. and it's going to be delivered. we have operation warp speed which is the military is going to distribute the vaccine. i can tell you from personal

experience that, uh, i was in the hospital. i had it. and i got better. and i will tell you that i had something that they gave me, a therapeutic, i guess they would call it, some people could say it was a cure, but, uh, i was in for a short period of time and i got better very fast or i wouldn't be here tonight. and now they say i'm immune. whether it's four months or a lifetime, nobody has been able to say that, but i'm immune. more and more people are getting better. we have a problem that's a worldwide problem. this is a worldwide problem. but i've been congratulated by the heads of many countries on what we've been able to do with the -- if you take a look at what we've done in terms of goggles and masks and gowns and everything else, and in particular ventilators. we're now making ventilators all over the world, thousands and thousands a month, distributing them all over the world. it will go away and as i say, we're rounding the turn. we're rounding the corner. it's going away. >> okay.

former vice president biden, to you, how would you lead the country out of this crisis. you have two minutes uninterrupted. >> 220,000 americans dead. you hear nothing else i say tonight, hear this. if anyone is responsible for not taking control, in fact not -- saying "i take no responsibility," initially. anyone responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the united states of america. we're in a situation where there are a thousand deaths a day now. a thousand deaths a day. there are over 70,000 new cases per day. compared to what's going on in europe as "the new england medical journal" said, they're starting from a very low rate. we're starting from a very high rate. the expectation is we'll have another 200,000 americans dead between now and the end of the year. if we just wore these masks, the

president's own advisers have told him, we could save 100,000 lives. and we're in a circumstance where the president thus far and still has no plan. no comprehensive plan. what i would do is make sure we have everyone encouraged to wear a mask all the time. i would make sure we move in the direction of rapid testing, investing in rapid testing. i would make sure that we set up national standards as to how to open up schools and open up businesses so they can be safe and give them the wherewithal, the financial resources to be able to do that. we're in a situation now where "the new england medical journal," one of the most serious journals in the whole world, said for the first time ever that the way this president has responded to this crisis has been absolutely tragic. and so, folks, i will take care of this. i will end this. i will make sure we have a plan. >> president trump, i would like to follow up with you, in your comments you talked about taking a therapeutic.

i assume you're referencing regeneron. you also said a vaccine will be coming within weeks. >> yes. >> is that a guarantee? >> no, it's not a guarantee but it will be by the end of the year but i think it has a good chance. there are two companies. i think within a matter of weeks. and it will be distributed very quickly. >> can you tell us which companies? >> johnson & johnson is doing very well. moderna is doing very well. pfizer is doing very well. and we have numerous others. then we also have others that we're working on very closely with other countries, in particular europe. >> let me follow up with you because this is new information. you have said a new vaccine is coming soon within weeks. your own officials say it could take well into 2021 at the earliest for enough americans to get vaccinated and even then they say americans will be wearing masks and distancing until 2022. is your timeline realistic? >> i think my timeline is more accurate. i don't know if they're counting on the military, we have our general, the head of logistics,

this is an easy distribution for him, he's ready to go. we expect to have 100 million vials. as soon as we have the vaccine, he's ready to go. >> vice president biden? 40% of americans say they would definitely agree to take a coronavirus vaccine if it was approved by the government. what steps would you take to give americans confidence in a vaccine if it were approved? >> make sure it's totally transparent. have the scientists see it, know it, look at it, go through all the processes. and by the way, this is the same fellow who told you this was going to end by easter last time. this is the same fellow who told you don't worry, we're going to end this by the summer. we're about to go into a dark winter, a dark winter. and he has no clear plan and there's no prospect that there's going to be a vaccine available for the majority of the american people before the middle of next year. >> president trump, your reaction? he says you have no plan. >> we're not going to have a dark winter at all. we're opening up our country. we've learned and studied and understand the disease which we didn't at the beginning. when i closed and banned china

from coming in, heavily infected, and then ultimately europe, but china was in january. months later he was saying i was xenophobic, i did it too soon. now he's saying i should have move quicker. but he didn't move quicker. he was months behind me, many months behind me. frankly he ran the h1n1 swine flu and it was a total disaster, far less lethal, it was a total disaster. had that had this kind of numbers, 700,000 people would be dead right now. but it was a far less lethal disease. look, his own person who ran that for him, who as you know was his, uh, chief of staff, said it was catastrophic, it was horrible, we didn't know what we were doing. now he comes up and he tells us how to do this. also, everything that he said about the way every single move that he said we should make, that's what we've done.

we've done all of it. but he was way behind us. >> vice president biden, your response. >> my response is, he is xenophobic, but not because he shut down access from china. and he did it late, after 40 countries had already done that. in addition to that, what he did, he made sure we had 44 people that were in there, in china, trying to get to wuhan to determine what the source was, what did the president say in january? he said, no. he's being transparent, the president of china is being transparent, we owe him a debt of gratitude, we ought to thank him. he talks about using the defense act to get whatever is needed out there to protect people. again, i go back to this. nothing he did, virtually nothing. then he gets out of the hospital and he talks about, don't worry, it's all going to be over soon. come on. there's not another serious scientist in the world who says it's going to be over soon. >> i don't say over soon.

i'm saying we're learning to live with it. we have no choice. we can't lock ourselves up in a basement like joe does. he has the ability to lock himself up. i don't know, he's obviously made a lot of money someplace. but he he has this thing about living in a basement. people can't do that. by the way, i as the president couldn't do that. i would love to put myself in the basement or a beautiful room until the white house and go away for a year and a half until it disappears. i can't do that. kirsten, every meeting i had, every meeting i had, and i meet a lot of families including gold star families and military families, and i had to meet them, i had to, it would be horrible to have canceled everything, i said, you know, this is dangerous, and you catch it, and i caught it, i learned a lot, i learned a lot, great doctors, great hospitals, and now i recovered. 99.9 of young people recover. 99% of people recover. we have to recover. we can't close up our nation. we have to open our schools.

and we can't close up our nation off you're not going to have a nation. >> and of course the cdc has said young people can get sick with covid-19 and can pass it. vice president biden, i want to talk broadly about strategy, though. >> can i respond to that? >> 30 seconds, please. >> number one, he says we're learning to live with it. people are learning to die with it. you folks at home will have an empty chair at the kitchen table this morning. that man or wife going to bed at night and reaching over to touch out of habit where their wife or husband was, they're gone. learning to live with it? come on. we're dying with it. he said it's dangerous. when is the last time? is it really dangerous still? you tell the people it's dangerous now? what should they do about the danger? and you say, i take no responsibility. >> let me talk about your -- >> excuse me. >> very quickly. >> i take full responsibility. it's not my fault that it came here. it's china's fault. and you know what? it's not joe's fault that it came here either.

it's china's fault. they kept it from going into the rest of china for the most part but they didn't keep it from coming out to the world including europe and ourselves. >> vice president biden? >> the fact is that when we knew it was coming, when it hit, what happened? what did the president say? he said don't worry, it's going to go away, be gone by easter. don't worry, the warm weather. don't worry, maybe inject bleach. he said he was kidding when he said that. a lot of people thought he was serious. a whole range of things the president has said. even today he thinks we're in control. we're about to lose 200,000 more people. >> president trump. >> look, perhaps just to finish this, i was kidding on that, but just to finish this, when i closed, he said i shouldn't have closed. and that went on for months. what nancy pelosi said, the same thing, she was dancing on the streets in chinatown in san francisco. but when i closed, he said this is a terrible thing, you're xenophobic. i think he called me racist even

because i was closing it to china. now he says i should have closed it earlier. it just -- joe, it doesn't work. >> i didn't say either of those things. >> you certainly did. you certainly did. >> i talked about xenophobia in a different context. it wasn't about closing the border to chinese coming to the united states. >> all right. i want to talk about both of your different strategies to -- >> he thought i shouldn't have closed the border. that's obvious. >> do you want to respond to that quickly? >> no. >> okay. let's talk about your different strategies toward dealing with this. mr. vice president, you suggested you would support new shutdowns if scientists recommended it. what do you say to americans who are fearful that the cost of shutdowns, the impact on the economy, the higher rates of hunger, depression, domestic and substance abuse, outweighs the risk of exposure to the virus? >> what i would say is, i'm going to shut down the virus, not the country. it's his ineptitude that caused the country to have to shut down in large part. why businesses have gone under, why schools are closed, why so many people lost their living,

and why they're concerned. the other concerns are real. that's why he should have been, instead of in a sand trap at his golf course, he should have been negotiating with nancy pelosi and the republicans in congress about what they're doing to make sure people had the capacity. >> you haven't ruled out more shutdowns. >> no, i'm not shutting down, but look, they need standards. the standard is, if you have a reproduction rate in a community that's above a certain level, everybody says slow up. more social distancing. do not open bars and do not open gymnasiums, do not open until you get this under control, under more control. but when you do open, give the people the capacity to be able to open and have the capacity to do it safely. for example, schools. schools, they need a lot of money to open. they need to deal with ventilation systems. they need to deal with smaller classes, more teachers, more pods. and he's refused to support that money or at least up to now. >> let's talk about schools. president trump --

>> i have to respond, if i might. >> please, then i have a followup. >> thank you, i appreciate that. look, all he does is talk about shutdown. forget about him. his democrat governors, cuomo in new york, you look at what's going on in california, you look at pennsylvania, north carolina. democrats, democrats all, they're shut down so tight and they're dying. they're dying. and he supports all these people. all he talks about is shutdowns. no, we're not going to shut down. we have to open the schools. as an example, i have a young son, he also tested positive. by the time i spoke to the doctor the second time, he was fine. it just went away. young people, i guess it's their immune system. >> let me follow up with you, president trump. you've demanded schools open in person and insist they can do it safely. but just yesterday boston became the latest city to move its public school system entirely online after a coronavirus spike. what is your message to parents who worry that sending their children to school will endanger not only their kids but also their teachers and families? >> i want to open the schools.

the transmittal rate to the teachers is, uh, very small. but i want to open the schools. we have to open our country. we're not going to have a country. we can't do this. we can't keep this country closed. that's a massive country with a massive economy. people are losing their jobs, they're committing suicide, that's depression, alcohol, drugs, at a level that nobody's ever seen before. there's abuse, tremendous abuse. we have to open our country. you know, i've said it often. the cure cannot be worse than the problem itself. that's what's happening. and he wants to close down, he'll close down the country if one person in our massive bureaucracy says we should close it down. >> vice president biden, your response. >> simply not true. we ought to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. we ought to be able to safely open but when they need resources to open, you need to be able to, for example, if you open a business, have social distancing within the business. you need to have, if you have a

restaurant, you need to have plexiglass dividers so people cannot infect one another. you need to be in a position where you can take testing rapidly and know whether a person is in fact infected. you need to be able to trace. you need to be able to provide all the resources that are needed to do this. and that is not inconsistent with saying we're going to make sure we reopen safely. and all you teachers out there, not that many of you will do ie so don't worry about it? come on. >> if you go and look at what's happened to new york, it's a ghost town, it's a ghost town. when you talk about plexiglass, these are restaurants that are dying. these are businesses with no money. putting up plexiglass is unbelievably expensive and it's not the answer. i mean, you're going to sit there in a cubeicle wrapped around with plastic? these are businesses that are dying, joe.

you can't do that to people. you just can't. take a look new york, what's happened to my wonderful city, for so many years i loved it, it's vibrant. it's dying. everybody is leaving new york. >> take a look at what new york has done in terms of turning the curve down in terms of the number of people dying. i don't look at this the way he does, blue states and red states. they're all the united states. look at the states that are having such a spike in coronavirus. they're the red states. they're the states in the midwest. they're the states in the upper midwest. that's where the spike is occurring significantly. but they're all americans. they're all americans. and what we have to do is say, wear these masks, number one. make sure we get the help that the businesses need, the money has already been passed to do that, it's been out there since the beginning of the summer, and nothing's happened. >> kristen, new york has lost more than 40,000 people, 11,000 people in nursing homes. >> president trump, what about -- >> take a look at what's happening in pennsylvania.

where they've had it closed. take a look at what's happening with your friend in michigan, where her husband is the only one allowed to do anything. it's been like a prison. now, it was just ruled unconstitutional. take a look at north carolina. they're having spikes. and they've been closed. and they're getting killed financially. we can't let that happen, joe. you can't let that happen. we have to open up. and we understand the disease. we have to protect our seniors. we have to protect our elderly. we have to protect especially our seniors with heart problems and diabetes problems. and we will protect them. we have the best testing in the world by far. that's why we have so many cases. >> let me follow up with you before we move on to our next sections, president trump. this week you called dr. anthony fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, quote, a disaster. you describe other medical experts idiots. if you're not listening to them, who are you listening to to fight this? >> i listen to all of them, including anthony. i get along very well with

anthony. he did say don't wear masks. he did say, as you know, this is not going to be a problem. i think he's a democrat, but that's okay. he said this is not going to be a problem. we are not going to have a problem at all. when joe says i said anthony fauci said and others and many others, and i'm not knocking them, nobody knew, look, nobody knew what this thing was, nobody knew where it was coming from, what it was. we've learned a lot. but anthony said, don't wear masks. now he wants to wear masks. anthony also said if you look back, exact words, here is his exact words. this is no problem, this is going to go away soon. so he's allowed to make mistakes. he happens to be a good person. >> vice president biden, your response quickly. >> my response is that think about what the president knew in january and didn't tell the american people. he was told this was a serious virus that spread in the air and it was much worse than -- much worse than the flu. he went on record and said to one of your colleagues,

recorded, that in fact he knew how dangerous it was but he didn't want to tell us, he didn't want to tell us because he didn't want us to panic. americans don't panic. he panicked. guess what, in the meantime we find out in "the new york times" the other day that in fact his folks went to wall street and said this is a really dangerous thing and a memo out of that meeting, not from his administration but from some of the brokers, said sell short, because we have to get moving, it's a dangerous problem. >> i'm going to give you 30 seconds to respond and then we're going to move on. >> you're the one that takes all the money from wall street. i don't take it. you have raised a lot of money, tremendous amounts of money, and every time you raise money, deals are made. i could raise so much more money. as president and as president that knows most of those people, i could call the heads of wall street, the heads of every company in america. i would blow away every record. but i don't want to do that, because it puts me in a bad position. then you bring up wall street? you shouldn't be bringing up wall street because you're the one that takes the money from wall street, not money.

i could blow away your records that like you wouldn't believe. we don't need money, we have plenty of money. in fact we beat hillary clinton with a tiny fraction. >> average contribution, $43. >> we're going to move on to our next session which is national security. i do want to start with the security of our elections and some breaking news from overnight. just last night, top telling officials confirmed again that both russia and iran are working to influence this election. both countries have obtained u.s. voter registration information, these officials say, and iran sent intimidating messages to florida voters. this question goes to you, mr. vice president, what would you do to put an end to this threat. you have two minutes uninterrupted. >> i made it clear, and i ask everyone else to take the pledge. i made it clear that any country, no matter who it is, that interferes in american elections, will pay a price. they will pay a price. it's been overwhelmingly clear, this election, i won't even get into the last one, this

election, that russia has been involved. china has been involved to some degree. and now we learn that iran is involved. they will pay a price if i'm elected. they're interfering with american sovereignty. that's what's going on right now. they're interfering with american sovereignty. to the best of my knowledge, i don't think the president has said anything to putin about it, i don't think he's talking to him a lot, he hasn't said a word. i don't know why he hasn't said a word to putin about it and i don't know what if anything he said to the iranians, my guess is he would be more outspoken with the iranians. but the point is this, folks. we're in a situation where we have foreign countries trying to interfere in the outcome of our election. his own national security adviser told him that what is happening with his buddy -- i shouldn't -- i will. his buddy rudy giuliani, he's being used as a russian pawn, he's being fed information that is russian -- that is not true.

and what happens? nothing happens. then you find out that everything that's going on on here about russia is wanting to make sure that i do not get elected the next president of the united states because they know i know them. and they know me. i don't understand why this president is unwilling to take on putin when he's actually paying bounties to pay american soldiers in afghanistan, when he's engaged in activities that are trying to destabilize all of nato. i don't know why he doesn't do it. but it's worth asking the question, why isn't that being done. any country that interferes with us will in fact pay a price because they're affecting our sovereignty. >> president trump, same question to you. let me ask the question. you'll have two minutes to respond, for two elections in a row now there has been substantial interference from foreign adversaries. what would you do in your next term to put an end to this? two minutes uninterrupted. >> let me respond to the first part as joe answered. joe got $3.5 million from russia. and it came through putin because he was very friendly

with the former mayor of moscow, it was the mayor of moscow's wife, and you got $3.5 million. your family got $3.5 million. and, you know, some day you're going to have to explain why did you get 3.5 -- i never got any money from russia, i don't get money from russia. about your thing last night, i knew all about that. and through john, who is -- john ratcliffe, who is a fantastic dni, he said the one thing that's common to both of them, they both want you to lose, because there has been nobody tougher to russia, between the sanctions, nobody tougher than me on russia, between the sanctions, between all of what i've done with nato, i've got the nato countries to put up an extra $130 billion going to $420 billion a year. that's to guard against russia. i sold -- while he was selling pillows and sheets, i sold tank busters to ukraine. there has been nobody tougher on russia than donald trump.

and i'll tell you, they were so bad, they took over the submarine port, you remember that very well, during your term, during you and barack obama, they took over a big part of what should have been ukraine. you handed it to them. but you were getting a lot of money from russia. they were paying you a lot of money. and they probably still are. but now, with what came out today, it's even worse. all of the emails, the emails, the horrible emails of the kind of money that you were raking in, you and your family, and joe, you were vice president when some of this was happening, and it should have never happened. and i think you owe an explanation to the american people. why is it, somebody just had a news conference a little while ago who was essentially supposed to work with you and your family, but what he said was damning. and regardless of me, i think you have to clean it up and talk to the american people, maybe you can do it right now. >> vice president biden, you may respond. then i do want to follow up on

the election security. >> i have not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life. we learned that this president paid 50 times the tax in china, has a secret bank account with china, does business in china. and in fact is talking about me taking money? i have not taken a single penny from any country whatsoever, ever. number one. number two, this is a president, i have released all of my tax returns, 22 years, go look at them, 22 years of my tax returns. you have not released a single solitary year of your tax return. what are you hiding? why are you unwilling? the foreign countries are paying you a lot. russia's paying you a lot. china's paying you a lot. and your hotels and all your businesses all around the country, all around the world. and china's building a new road to a golf course you have overseas. so what's going on here? why not release your tax returns or stop talking about

corruption. >> president trump, your response. >> first of all, i called my accountants. under audit. i'm going to release them as soon as we can. i want to do it. it will show how successful, how great this company is. much more importantly than that, people were saying, $750. i asked them, a week ago, i said, what did i pay? they said, sir, you prepaid tens of millions of dollars. i prepaid my tax. over the last number of years. tens of millions of dollars. i prepaid. because at some point they think it's an estimate. they think i may have to pay tax. so i already prepaid it. nobody told me that. >> did your accountant tell you when you can release them? >> excuse me. they keep talking about $750 which i think is a filing fee. let me just tell you, i prepaid millions and millions of dollars in taxes. number one. number two, i don't make money from china, you do. i don't make money from ukraine, you do. i don't make money from russia. you made $3.5 million, joe.

and your son gave you -- they even have a statement that we have to give 10% to the big man. you're the big man, i think. i don't know. maybe you're not. but you're the big man, i think. you said we have to give 10% to the big man. joe, what's that all about? it's terrible. >> gentlemen -- >> i have to respond. >> i'm going to let you both respond very quickly. you just said you spoke to your accountant about potentially releasing your taxes. did he tell you when you can release them? do you have a deadline for when you're going to release them to the american people? >> i get treated worse than the tea party got treated. you have a lot of people there, deep down in the irs, they treat me horribly. we made a deal, it was all settled until i decide to run for president. i get treated very badly by the irs, very unfairly. but we had a deal all done. as soon as we're completed with the deal, i want to release it. but i have paid millions and millions of dollars. and it's worse than paying. i paid in advance. it's called prepaying your taxes. i paid it in advance. >> i want to ask you both about

questions regarding your potential foreign entanglements and questions that have been raised to give you both a chance -- respond very quickly and then i'll get to my question. >> he's been saying this for four years. show us. just show us. stop playing around. you've been saying for four years you're going to release your taxes. nobody knows, mr. president. what they do know is you're not paying your taxes or your paying tax than are so low. when last time he said what he paid, he said, i only paid that little because i'm smart, i know how to game the system. come on. come on, folks. >> president trump, then i want to get to two questions to both of you. >> sure. i was put through a phony witch hunt for three years. it started before i even got elected. they spied on my campaign. no president should ever have to go through what i went through. let me just say this. mueller and 18 angry democrats

and fbi agents all over the place spent $48 million. they went through everything i had, including my tax returns, and they found absolutely no collusion and nothing wrong. 48 million. i guarantee you, if i spent $1 million on you, joe, i could find plenty wrong because -- >> all right. >> -- the kind of things you've done and the monies your family has taken, your brother made money in iraq, millions of dollars. your other brother made a fortune. it's all through you, joe. and they say you get some of it and you do live very well, you have houses all over the place, you live very well. >> gentlemen, let me just ask some questions about all of this broadly. vice president biden, there have been questions about the work your son has done in china and for ukrainian energy company when you were vice president. in retrospect, was anything about those relationships inappropriate or unethical? >> nothing was unethical. here's the deal. with regard to ukraine, we had this whole question about whether or not, because he was

on the board, i later learned, of burisma, a company, that somehow i had done something wrong. yet every single solitary person when he was going through his impeachment, testifying under oath, who worked for him, said i did my job impeccably. i carried out u.s. policy. not one single solitary thing was out of line. not a single thing, number one. number two, the guy who got in trouble in ukraine was this guy, trying to bribe the ukrainian government to say something negative about me, which they would not do and did not do because it never, ever, ever happened. my son has not made money in terms of this thing about -- what are you talking about, china. i have not -- the only guy who made money from china is this guy. the only one. nobody else has made money from china. >> president trump, let me ask my question to you. >> could i just -- one thing. >> very quickly. >> his son didn't have a job for a long time, was sadly no longer

in the military service, i won't get into that. and he didn't have a job. as soon as he became vice president, burisma, not the best reputation in the world, i hear they paid him $183,000 a month, listen to this, 183, and they gave him a $3 million up front payment. >> all right. >> and he had no -- >> i'm going to let the vice president respond quickly and then i need to get a question to had you of. >> no basis for that, everybody investigated that and nobody said i did anything wrong in ukraine. >> president trump, since you took office, you've never divested from your business. you personally promoted your properties abroad. a report this week which was referenced does indicate your company has a bank account in china. how can voters know that you don't have any foreign conflicts of interest? >> i have many bank accounts and they're all listed and they're all over the place. i was a businessman doing business. the bank account you're referring to, which is -- everybody knows about it, it's listed. the bank account was in 2013.

that's what it was. it was opened in -- it was closed in 2015, i believe. and then i decided, because i was going to do -- i was thinking about doing a deal in china like millions of other people, i was thinking about it, and i decided i'm not going to do it, didn't like it, i decided not to do it, had an account open, and i closed it. >> okay. >> excuse me. and then, unlike him, where he's vice president, and he does business, i then decided to run for president after that. that was before. so i closed it before i even ran for president, let alone became president. big difference. he is the vice president of the united states. and his son, his brother, and his other brother, are getting rich. they're like a vacuum cleaner. >> okay. president trump, thank you. >> it's not true. >> we need to move on. i do want to ask you, vice president biden, about china, let's talk about china more broadly. there have -- of course president trump has said that they should pay for not being

fully transpoarent in regards t the coronavirus. if you were president, would you make china play? please be specific. what would that look like? >> what i would make china do is play by the international rules, not like he has done. he has caused the deficit with china to go up, not down, with china, up, not down. we are making sure that in order to do business in china you have to give all your intellectual property, you have to have a partner in china, 51%. we would not do that at all, number one. number two, we're in a situation where china would have to play by the rules internationally as well. when i met with xi, and when i was still vice president, he said we're setting up identification zones in the south china sea, you can't fly through them. i said, we're going to fly through it, we're not going to pay attention. we have to play by the rules. what does he do? he embraces guys, the thugs in north korea and the chinese

president and putin and others, and he pokes his finger in the eye of all of our friends, all of our allies. we make up only -- we're 25%, 25% of the world's economy. we need to be having the rest of our friends with us, saying to china, these are the rules, you play by them or you're going to pay the price for not paying by them, economically. that's the way i will run it. and that's what we did in upholding steel tariffs and a range of other things when we were president and vice president. >> let's talk about north korea. >> excuse me, no, i have to respond to that. >> very quickly. then we'll move on to north korea. >> he took a billion and a half dollars from china. >> not true. >> after being in air force two. number two, there's a strong email talking about your family wanting to make $10 million for introductions. >> not true. >> president trump, what specifically are you going to do to make china pay? you said you'll make them pay.

>> they're paying. >> new sanctions? >> i just gave $28 billion to our farmers. >> taxpayers' money. >> it's what? >> taxpayers' money. it didn't come from china. >> it's called china. china -- >> not true. >> -- paid $28 billion. you know what they did to pay it, joe? they devalued their currency and they also paid up and you know who got the money, our farmers, our great farmers because they were targeted. you never charged them anything. also, i charged them 25% on dumped steel, because they were killing our steel industry. we were not going to have a steel industry. >> okay. >> and now we have a steel industry. >> vice president biden, your response, please. >> my response is, look. there's a reason why he's bringing up all this malarky. there's reason for this. he doesn't want to talk about the substantive issues. it's not about his family and my family. it's about your family. and your family's hurting badly. if you're making less than -- if you're a middle class family, you're getting hurt badly right now. you're sitting at the kitchen

table this morning and deciding, we can't get new tires, they're bald, because we have to wait another month or so, or are we going to be able to pay the mortgage or who is going to tell her she can't go back to community college. they're the decisions you're making, in middle class families like i grew up with like scranton and claymont. they're in trouble. we should be talking about your families. it's the last thing he wants to talk about. >> i do want to -- ten seconds, mr. president. >> it's a typical political statement, let's get off this china thing, then he looks, the family, around the table, everybody. just a typical politician. i'm not a typical politician. that's why i got elected. let's get off the subject of china. let's talk around sitting around the table. come on, joe, you can do better. >> we're going to talk about north korea now. president trump, you've met with north korean leader kim jong-un three times. you've talked about your beautiful letters with him. you've touted the fact that there hasn't been a war or a long ran ge missile test. yet north korea recently rolled

out its biggest intercontinental missile. just 30 seconds here. is this a betrayal? >> no. so when i met with barack obama, we sat in the white house right at the beginning, had a great conversation. it was supposed to be 15 minutes. it was well over an hour. he said the biggest problem we have is north korea. he indicated, we will be in a war with north korea. guess what? it would be a nuclear war. and he does have plenty of nuclear capability. in the meantime i have a very good relationship with him. different kind of a guy. but he probably thinks the same thing about me. we have a different kind of a relationship. we have a very good relationship. and there's no war. and you know, about two months ago, he broke into a certain area, they said, oh, there's going to be trouble. i said, no, there's not because he's not going to do that and i was right. instead of being in a war where millions of people -- seoul, you know, is 25 miles away. millions and millions, 32 million people in seoul, millions of people would be dead right now. >> okay. president trump, that's 30

seconds, thank you. vice president biden, north korea conducted four nuclear tests under the obama administration. why do you think you would be able to rein in this persistent threat? >> because i would make it clear, which we made it clear to china, they have to be part of the deal. i made it clear as a spokesperson for the administration when i went to china, i said, why are you moving your missile defense up so close, why are you moving more forces here, why do you continue to do military maneuvers with south korea? i said, because north korea is a problem. and we're going to continue to do it. so we can control them. we're going to make sure we can control them and make sure they cannot hurt us. and so if you want to do something about it, step up and help. if not, it's going to continue. what has he done? he's legitimized north korea. he's talked about his good buddy who is a thug, a thug, and he talks about how we're better off. and they have much more capable missiles, able to reach u.s. territory much more easily than they ever did before.

>> let me follow up, vice president biden, you said you wouldn't meet with kim jong-un without preconditions. are there any conditions under which you would meet with him? >> on the condition that he would agree that he would be drawing down his nuclear capacity to get -- the korean peninsula should you be a nuclear-free zone. >> let's move on to american families. very quickly, ten seconds, president. >> they tried to meet with him. he wouldn't do it. he didn't like obama. he wouldn't do it. they tried. he wouldn't do it. and that's okay. you know what, north korea, we're not in a war, we have a good relationship. you know, people don't understand, having a good relationship with the leaders -- >> we have to move on, president trump, we have a lot of questions to get to. >> we had a good relationship with hitler before he in fact invaded europe, the rest of europe. come on. the reason he would not meet with president obama is because president obama said we're going to talk about denuclearization,

we're going to push stronger and stronger sanctions on you. that's why he wouldn't meet with us. >> and it didn't happen -- excuse me. >> let's move on and -- >> they left me a mess. north korea was a mess. >> we need to move on. >> if you remember, the first two or three months, there was a very dangerous period, in my first three months before we sort of worked things out a little bit. >> okay. >> they left us a mess. and obama would be, i think, the first to say, it was the single biggest problem, he thought, for our country. >> okay. let's move on to american families and the economy. one of the issues most important to them is health care, as you both know. today there was a key vote on a new supreme court justice, amy coney barrett. and health care is at the center of her confirmation fight. over 20 million americans get their health insurance through the affordable care act. it's headed to the supreme court. and your administration, mr. president, is advocating for the court to overturn it. if the supreme court does overturn that law, those 20 million americans could lose

their health insurance almost overnight. so what would you do if those people have their health insurance taken away? you have two minutes uninterrupted. >> sure. first of all, i've already done something nobody thought was possible. through the legislature, i terminated the individual mandate. that is the worst part of obamacare, as we call it. the individual mandate where you have to pay a fortune for the privilege of not having to pay for bad health insurance. i terminated it, it's gone. now it's in court. because obamacare is no good. but then i made a decision, run it as well as you can, to my people, great people, run it as well as you can. i could have gone the other route and made everybody very unhappy. they ran it. premiums are down. everything is down. here's the problem. no matter how well you run it, it's no good. what we would like to do is terminate it. we have the individual mandate done. i don't know that it's going to work. if we don't win, we'll have to run it and we'll have obamacare but it will be better run. but it no longer is obamacare

because without the individual mandate it's much different. preexisting conditions will always stay. what i would like to do is a much better health care, much better. we'll always protect people with preexisting. so i would like to terminate obamacare, come up with a brand-new beautiful health care. the democrats will do it because there will be tremendous pressure on him and we might even have the house by that time and i think we're going to win the house, okay, you'll see, but i think we're going to win the house. but come up with a better health care, always protecting people with preexisting conditions. and one thing very important, we have 180 million people out there that have great private health care. far more than we're talking about with obamacare. joe biden is going to terminate all of those policies. these are people that love their health care. people that have been successful, middle income people, been successful. they have 180 million plans, 180 million people, families, under what he wants to do, which will basically be socialized

medicine, he won't even have a choice, they want to terminate 180 million plans. we have done an incredible job on health care. and we're going to do even better. >> okay. vice president biden, yes, this is for you, your health care plan calls for building on obamacare, so my question is, what is your plan if the law is ruled unconstitutional by the supreme court? you have two minutes uninterrupted. >> what i'm going to do is pass obamacare with a public option. it will become bidencare. the public option is an option that says if you do not in fact have the wherewithal, if you qualify for medicaid and you do not have the wherewithal in your state to get medicaid, you're automatically enrolled, providing competition for insurance companies. that's what's going to happen. secondly we're golding to make sure we reduce drug prices and premiums by making sure there's competition that doesn't exist now, by allowing medicare to negotiate drug prices with the insurance companies.

thirdly, the idea that i want to eliminate private insurance, the reason why i had such a fight with 20 candidates for the nomination was, i support private insurance. nomination was, i support private insurance. that's why i did not one single person with private insurance would lose their insurance under my plan, nor did they under obamacare. they did not lose their insurance unless they chose they wanted to go to something else. lastly, we're going to make sure in a situation that we've actually protect preexisting conditions. there's no way he can protect preexisting conditions, none, zero. you can't do it in the ether. he's never come up with a plan. i guess we're going to get the preexisting condition plan when we get the infrastructure plan that we waited for in 17, 18,

19, 20. i know you're getting anxious. the fact is he's already cost the american people because of his terrible handling of the coronavirus and economic spillover. 10 million people have lost their private insurance and he wants to take away 22 million more people that have it under obamacare and 110 million people with preexisting conditions and all the people from covid are going to have preexisting conditions. what are think going to do? >> i have a follow-up. he's accused you of wanting socialized medicine. >> i'm saying it's ridiculous. it's like saying that the idea that the fact that there's a public option that people can choose, that makes it a socialist plan? look, the difference between the president, i think health care is not a privilege, it's a right. everyone should have a right to have affordable health care.

i'm proud of my plan. it's gotten endorsed by all the major labor unions as well as a whole range of other people who, in fact, are concerned in the medical field. this is something that's going to save people's lives and this is going to give people an opportunity to have health care for their children. how many of you home are worried and rolling around in bed tonight wondering what in god's name you're going to do if you get sick because you've lost your health insurance, your company has gone under? we have to provide health insurance for people at an affordable rate. that's what i do. >> president trump, your response? >> he was here for 47 years. he didn't do it. he was vice president for eight years. it's not like it was 25 years ago. it was three and three quarters. it was just a little while ago, right, less than four years ago. he didn't do anything. he didn't do it. he wants socialized medicine. it's not that he wants it. his vice president, i mean, she is more liberal than bernie sanders and wants it even more.

bernie sanders wants it. the democrats want it. you're going to have socialized medicine. just like you did with fracking. we're going to stop fracking. then he goes to pennsylvania where he got the nomination. he got very lucky to get it. he goes to pennsylvania and says, oh, we're going to have fracking. you never asked that question. so far i respect very much the way you're handling this, but somebody should ask the question. he goes for a year -- >> we have a number of topics. we're going to get to it. >> the same thing with socialized medicine -- >> vice president, your response? >> my response is people deserve to have affordable health care period, period, period. the biden care proposal will provide for that affordable health care, lower premiums. it's going to cost over $750 million to do it. you can lower your premiums,

deal with unexpected billing and have your drug prices drop significantly. he keeps talking about it. he hasn't done a thing for anybody on health care, not a thing. >> very quickly. i want to talk about what's happening on capitol hill. >> he's talking about socialized medicine and health care. when he talks about a public option, he's talking about destroying your medicare. >> come on. >> and destroying your social security. this whole country will come down. bernie sanders tried it. he tried it in his state. his governor was a very liberal governor. they wanted to make it work. >> let's hear vice president biden's response. >> he thinks he's running against somebody else. he's running against joe biden. i beat all those other people because i disagreed with them. joe biden is running. and the idea that we're in a situation that we're going to destroy medicare, this is the guy that the actuary of medicare said if, in fact -- social security, if, in fact, he

continues his plan to withhold the tax on social security, social security will be bankrupt by 2023 with no way to make up for it. this is the guy who's tried to cut medicare. i mean, the idea that donald trump is lecturing me on social security and medicare? come on. >> he tried to get -- he tried to get rid of social security years ago, years ago. go back and look at the records. he tried to hurt social security years ago. >> let's move on. mr. president, i have to move onto the next question. >> -- if i'm elected. if he's elected, the stock market will crash. >> let's move onto the next question. >> look, the idea that the stock market is booming is his only measure of what's happening. where i come from in scranton, the people don't live off of the stock market. just in the last three years during this crisis, the billionaires in this country

made, according to wall street, 700 billion more dollars, 700 billion more dollars, because that's his only measure. what happens to the ordinary people out there? what happens to them? >> we're going to move on. >> 401(k)'s are through the roof, stocks are through the roof. he doesn't come from scranton. he lived there for a short period of time before he even knew it and he left. >> let me move onto my next question. as of tonight, more than 12 million people are out of work and as of tonight 8 million americans have fallen into poverty. they see washington fighting over a relief bill. mr. president, why haven't you been able to get them the help they need? 30 seconds here. >> because nancy pelosi doesn't want to approve it. i do. >> you're the president. >> i do. but i still have to get -- that's one of the reasons i think we're going to take over

the house, because of her. nancy pelosi doesn't want to approve anything because she'd love to have some victories on a date called november 3rd. nancy pelosi does not want to approve it. we are ready, willing and able to do something. don't forget we've already approved three mplans and it's gone through, including the democrats in all fairness. she doesn't want it near the election because she thinks it helps her politically. i think it hurts her politically. >> the republican leader in the united states senate said he can't pass it. he will not be able to pass it. he does not have republican votes. why isn't he talking to his republican friends? >> let me follow up with you vice president biden. you are the leader of the democratic party. why have you not pushed the democrats to get a deal for the american people? >> well, i have and they have pushed it. look, they passed this act all the way back in the beginning of the summer. this is like it's not new. it's been out there. this heros act has been sitting there. look what's happening.

when i was in charge of the recovery act with $800 billion i was able to get 145 billion to local communities. they have to fire firefighters, teachers, first responders, law enforcement officers so they could keep the cities and counties running. he will not support that. they have not done a thing for them. mitch mcconnell said hit themleo bankrupt, let them go bankrupt. come on. >> it was a bailout of badly-run, high-crime democrat all run by democrat cities and states. it was a way of getting a lot of money, billions and billions of dollars. it was also a way of getting a lot of money from our people's pockets to people to come into our country illegally. we're going to take care of everything for them. what that does, and i'd love to do that, i'd love to help them, but what that does, everybody all over the world will start

pouring into our country. we can't do it. this was a way of taking care of them. this was a way of spending on things that had nothing to do with covid. it was really a big bailout for badly-run cities and states. >> if i get elected, i'm running as a proud democrat but i'm going to be the american president. i don't see red states and blue states. what i see is american, united states. folks, every single state finds themselves in trouble wlrhether they're red or blue they're going the start laying off firefighters. they allowed the federal government to spend to compensate for the united states of america. >> i want to talk about the minimum wage, gentlemen. mr. vice president, we are talking a lot about struggling small businesses and business owners these days. do you think this is the right time to ask them to raise the minimum wage? you of course support a $15 federal minimum wage. >> i do because i think we're going to have to bail them out

too. we should be bailing them out now, those small businesses. you got one in six of them going under. they're not going to be able to make it back. they passed a package that allows us to be able to call ppp. money is supposed to go to help and do everything from organize how they could deal with their businesses being open safely, schools how they can make classrooms smaller, how they can hire more teachers, how they can put ventilation systems in. they need the help, the businesses as well as the schools need the help. these guys will not help them. it's not giving them any of the money. >> we are going to move onto immigration. >> -- small businesses by raising the minimum wage. that's not helping. i think it should be a state option. alabama is different than new york. new york is different from vermont. every state is different. it should be a state option. it's very important. we have to help our small businesses. how are you helping your small businesses when you're forcing

wages? what's going to happen and what's been proven to happen is when you do that, these small businesses fire many of their employees. >> that's not true. >> you said you would consider raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. is that still the case? >> and i would consider it to an extent. in a second administration. but not to a level that's going to put all these businesses out of business. it should be a state option. i know different places. they're all different. some places, $15 is not so bad. in other places, other states, $15 -- >> president trump, thank you. response, vice president biden? >> two jobs, one job below poverty. people are making 6, 7, 8 bucks an hour. these first responder we all clap for as they come down the street because they've allowed us to make it. what's happening? they deserve a minimum wage of $15. anything below that puts you

below the poverty level. there's no evidence that when you raise the minimum wage, businesses go out of business. that is simply not true. >> we're going to talk about immigration now, gentlemen. we're going to talk about families within this context. mr. president, your administration separated children from their parents at the border, at least 4,000 kids. you've since reversed your zero tolerance policy, but the united states can't locate the parents of more than 500 children. so how will these families ever be reunited? >> the children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people, cartels and they're brought here and they used to use them to get into our country. we now have a stronger border as we've ever had. we're over 400 miles of brand new wall. you see the numbers. we let people in, but they have to come in legally. >> how will you reunite these kids with their families? >> let me tell you. they built cages. you know, they used to say i built the cages. and then they had a picture in a certain newspaper, there was a

picture of these horrible cages. they said look at these cages. president trump built them. then it was determined they were built in 2014. that was him. they built cages. >> are you going to reunite the kids? >> yes we're trying very hard. but a lot of these kids come out without the parents. they come over through cartels and coy ootes and gangs. >> these 500-plus kids came with parents. they separated them at the border to make it a disincentive to come to begin with. we're tough, we're really strong. guess what? it's not coyotes. their parents were with them. they got separated from their parents. it makes us a laughingstock and violates every notion of who we are as a nation. >> kristin, they did it. we changed the policy. they did it. >> we did not -- >> who built the cages?

>> let's talk about what we're talking about. what happened? parents, their kids were ripped from their arms and separated. now they cannot find over 500 sets of those parents and those kids are alone, nowhere to go, nowhere to go. it's criminal. it's criminal. >> let me ask you about it, ten seconds. >> they are so well taken care of. they're in facilities that were so clean. >> some of them haven't been reunited with their families. >> just ask one question. who built the cages? >> let me ask about your immigration policy, mr. vice president. the obama administration did fail to deliver immigration reform, which had been a key promise during the administration. it also presided over record deportations as well as family defences if he thinktentions be course. >> made a mistake. it took too long to get it

right. it took too long to get it right. i'll be president of the united states, not vice president of the united states. the fact is i've made it very clear. within 100 days i'm going to send the united states congress a pathway to citizenship for over 11 million undocumented people. all those so-called dreamers, those daca kids, they're going to be immediately certified again to be able to stay in this country and put on the path to citizenship. the idea that they are being sent home by this guy and they want to do that is they're going to a country they've never seen before. i can imagine you're 5 years old, your parents are taking you across the rio grande river and it's illegal. you say, oh no, mom, leave me here, i'm not going to go with you. they've been here. many of them are model citizens. over 20,000 of them are first responders, out there taking care of people during this crisis. we owe them. we owe them. >> president trump. >> he had eight years to do what he said he was going to do.

i've changed. without having a specific, we got rid of catch and release, we got rid of a lot of horrible things they put in and that they lived with. but he had eight years he was vice president. he did nothing except build cages to keep children in. >> vice president biden, your response? >> the catch and release, you know what he's talking about there? if, in fact, you had a family came across, they're arrested. they in fact were given a date to show up for their hearing. they were released. and they showed up for a hearing. this is the first president in the history of the united states of america that anybody seeking asylum has to do it in another country. that's never happened before in america. you come to the united states and you make your case that i seek asylum based on the following premise, why i deserve it under american law. they're sitting in squalor on

the other side of the river. >> president trump, your response? >> it just shows that he has no understanding of immigration of the laws. catch and release is a disaster. a murder wouer would come in, a rapist would come in, a very bad person could come in. we would take their name. we have to release them into our country. then you say they come back. less than 1% of the people come back. we have to send i.c.e. out and border patrol out to find them. we would say, come back in two years, three years, we're going to give you a court case. you'll be perry mason. we're going to give you a court case. when you say they come back, they don't come back, joe. they never come back. only the really -- i hate to say this, but those with the lowest iq, they might come back. >> let's give vice president biden a chance to respond. >> you don't know the law, joe. >> vice president biden, your response. >> the law he's talking about is simply not true.

check it out. >> they don't come out. we don't have to worry about it. they terminated it. >> you have 525 kids not knowing where in god's name they're going to be and lost their parents. >> let's talk about our next section, which is race in america. i want to talk about the way black and brown americans experience race in this country. part of that experience is something called the talk. it happens regardless of class and income. parents who feel they have no choice but to prepare their children for the chance that they could be targeted including by the police for no reason other than the color of their skin. mr. vice president, in the next two minutes, i want you to speak directly to these families. do you understand why these parents fear for their children? >> i do, i do. my daughter is a social worker. she's written a lot about this. she has a graduate degree from university of pennsylvania in social work. you know, one of the reasons why

i ended up working on the east side of wilmington, delaware, which is 90% african-american, was to learn more about what was going on. i never had to tell my daughter if she's pulled over, make sure she puts both hands on top of the wheel and don't reach for the glove box because someone may shoot you. but a black parent, no matter how wealthy or how poor they are, has to teach their child when you're walking down the street, don't have a hoodie on when you go across the street, making sure that you, in fact, if you get pulled over, yes, sir, no, sir, hands on top of the wheel because you are, in fact, the victim whether you're a person making $300,000 a year or someone who's on food stamps. the fact of the matter is there is institutional racism in america. we have always said, we've never lived up to it, that we hold these truths to be self-evident, all men and women are created

equal. guess what? we have never, ever lived up to it. we're constantly moving further and further to inclusion, not exclusion. this is the first president that has come along and said dthat's the end of that. we have to provide better economic opportunity, better education, better health care, better access to schooling, better access to borrow money to start businesses, all the things we can do. and i've laid out a clear plan as to how to do those things just to give people a shot. it's about accumulating the ability to have wealth as well as it is to be free from violence. >> president trump, same question to you. let me remind you of the question. i would like you to speak directly to these families. do you understand why these parents fear for their children? >> yes, i do. and again, he's been in government 47 years. he never did a thing, except in 1994 when he did such harm to the black community. they were called and he called

them super predators. he said that. he said it, super predators. and they could never live that down. 1994, your crime bill, the super predators. nobody has done more for the black community than donald trump. if you look, with the exception of abraham lincoln, possible exception, but the exception of abraham lincoln, nobody has done what i've done. criminal justice reform, obama and joe didn't do it. i don't even think they tried because they had no chance at doing it. they might have wanted to do it, but if you had to see the arms i had to twist to get that done, it was not a pretty picture. and everybody knows it, including some very liberal people that cried in my office. they cried in the oval office. two weeks later they're out saying, gee, we have to defeat them. criminal justice reform, prison reform, opportunities with tim scott, a great senator from

south carolina, he came in with this incredible idea for opportunity zones. people don't talk about it. tremendous investment is being made. biggest beneficiary, the black and hispanic communities and historically black colleges and universities. after three years of coming to the office, i loved some of those guys, they were great. they came into the office. i said why do you keep coming back? because we have no funding. i said you don't have to come back every year. they have to come back because president obama would never give them long-term funding. i did, ten-year long-term funding. i gave them more money than they asked for. i said, i think you need more. the only bad part about this is i may never see you again. i got very friendly with them. colleges and universities. >> your response to that, vice president? >> my response to that is i never ever said what he accused me of saying.

the fact of the matter is in 2000, though, after the crime bill had been in the law for a while, this is a guy who said the problem with the crime bill, there's not enough people in jail, there's not enough people in jail. and go on my website, get the quote, the date when he said it, not enough people. he talked about marauding gangs. this is a guy who when the central park five, five innocent black kids, he continued to push for making sure they got the death penalty. none of them were guilty of the crimes suggested. look, granted, he did, in fact, he commuted 20 people's sentences. we commuted over 1,000 people's sentences. the very law he's talking about is a law that in fact initiated by barack obama. secondly, we're in a situation here where the federal prison system was reduced by 38,000

people under our administration. one of the things we should be doing, there should be no, no minimum mandatories in the law. that's why i'm offering $20 billion to states to change their state laws to eliminate minimum mandatories and set up drug courts. no one should be going to jail because they have a drug problem. they should be going to rehabilitation, not to jail. we should fundamentally change the system and that's what i'm going to do. >> why didn't he do it four years ago? why didn't you do that four years ago? you were vice president. you keep talking about all these things you're going to do. but you were there just a short time ago and you guys did nothing. joe, i ran because of you. i ran because of barack obama, because you did a poor job. if i thought you did a good job, i would have never run. i would have never run. i ran because of you. i'm looking at you now. you're a politician. i ran because of you. >> vice president biden, your response to that?

>> i hope he does look at me because what's happening here is you know who i am, you know who he is, you know his character, you know my character. you know our reputations for honor and telling the truth. i am anxious to have this race. i am anxious to see this take place. the character of the country is on the ballot. look at us closely. >> true about russia, ukraine, china, iraq, if this is true, he's a corrupt politician. don't give me this enough about how you're this innocent baby. joe, they're calling you a corrupt politician. >> i want to stay on the issue of race. president trump, we're talking about race right now and i do want to stay on the issue of race. >> i have to respond to that. >> please, very quickly. >> look, there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he's accusing me

of is a russian plan. they have said this has -- five former heads of the cia, both parties say what he's saying is a bunch of garbage. nobody believes it except his and his good friend rudy giuliani. >> you mean the laptop is another russia russia hoax? >> that's exactly what -- >> this is where he's going. the laptop -- >> i want to stay on the issue of race. >> you have to be kidding me. here we go again with russia. >> we're going to continue with the issue of race. mr. president you described the black lives matter movement as a symbol of hate. you said that black professional athletes exercising their first amendment rights should be fired. what do you say to americans who say that kind of language from a president is contributing to a climate of hate and racial strife? >> the first time i ever heard of black lives matter, they were

chanting pigs in a blanket, talking about police. pigs, talking about our police. pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon. i said that's a horrible thing. and they were marching down the street. that was my first glimpse of black lives matter. i thought it was a terrible thing. as far as my relationships with all people, i think i have great relationships with all people. i am the least racist person in this room. >> what do you say to americans who are concerned by that rhetoric? >> i don't know what to say. i got criminal justice reform done and prison reform and opportunity zones. i took care of black colleges and universities. i don't know what to say. they can say anything. i mean, they can say anything. it makes me sad, because i am, i am the least racist person. i can't even see the audience because it's so dark, but i don't care who's in the audience, i'm the least racist person in this room. >> okay. vice president biden, let me ask

you very quickly and then i have a follow-up question. >> abraham lincoln here is one of the most racist presidents who has a modern history. he pours fuel on every single racist fire, every single one. started off his campaign coming down the escalator saying he's going to get rid of those mexican rapists. he's banned muslims because they're muslims. he has moved around and made everything worse across the board. he says about the poor boys, last time we were on stage here he said i told them to stand down and stand ready. come on. this guy is a dog whistle about as big as a fog horn. >> president trump, i'm going to give you ten seconds to respond. >> you made a reference to abraham lincoln. where did that come in? >> you said abraham lincoln. >> no, no. i said not since abraham lincoln has anybody done what i've done for the black community. i didn't say i'm abraham lincoln. i said not since abraham lincoln has anybody done what i've done

for the back community. now, you have done nothing, other than the crime bill which put -- >> oh, god. >> -- tens of thousands of black men mostly in jail. >> all right. let me stop. >> if you look at what's happening with the voting right now -- >> let me ask vice president biden about -- >> take a look at what's happening out there. >> vice president biden, let me give you a chance to respond within this context. crime bills you supported in the '80s and '90s contributed to the incarceration of tens of thousands of young black men who had small amounts of drugs in their possession. they are sons, brothers, fathers, uncles whose families are still to this day, some of them, suffering the consequences. speak to those families. why should they vote for you? >> in the '80s we passed 100%, all 100 senators voted for it, a bill on drugs and how to deal with drugs. it was a mistake. i've been trying to change it since then, particularly the portion on cocaine. that's why i've been arguing

that, in fact, we should not send anyone to jail for a pure drug offense. they should be going into treatment across the board. that's what we should be spending money on. that's why i set up drug courts, which were never funded by our republican friends. they should not be going to jail for a drug or an alcohol problem. they should be going into treatment, treatment. that's what we've been trying to do. that's what i'm going to get done, because the american people have now seen that, in fact, it was a mistake to pass those laws relating to drugs, but they were not in the crime bill. >> why didn't you get it done? it's all talk, no action with these politicians. what i'm going to do when i become president -- you were vice president along with obama as your president, your leader, for eight years. why didn't you get it done? you had eight years to get it done. now you're saying you're going to get it done because you're all talk and no action, joe. >> we got a lot of it done.

we released 38,000 prisoners. >> you got nothing done. >> 38,000 prisoners were released from federal prison. there were over a thousand people who were given clemency. in fact, we're the ones who put in the legislation saying we could look at pattern and practice in police departments and what they were doing, how they were conducting themselves. i could go on, but we began the process. we began the process. we lost an election. that's why i'm running, to win back that election and change this terrible policy. >> your response. >> why didn't you do in the eight years, a short time ago? why didn't you do it? you just said i'm going to do that, i'm going to do this. you put tens of thousands of mostly black young men in prison. now you're saying you're going to undo that. why didn't you get it done? you had eight years with obama. you know why, joe, because you're all talk and no action. >> vice president biden and then we're going to move onto the next section. >> we had a republican congress.

that's the answer. >> you've got to talk them into it, you know? >> we're going to move onto our next section. >> like i did with criminal justice reform. i had to talk democrats into it. >> gentlemen, we're running out of time so we've got to get to climate change. you both have very different visions of climate change. president trump, you say that environmental regulations have hurt jobs in the energy sick ec. vice president biden, you have said you see addressing climate change as an opportunity to create new jobs. how would you both combat climate change and support job growth at the same time, starting with you, president trump? you have two minutes uninterrupted. >> so we had the trillion trees program. we have so many different programs. i do love the environment, but what i want is the cleanest, crystal clear water, the cleanest air. we have the best, lowest number in carbon emissions, which is a big standard that i noticed obama goes with all the time, not joe.

i haven't heard joe use the term, because i'm not sure he knows what it represents or means, but i have heard obama use it. we have the best carbon emission numbers that we've had in 35 years under this administration. we are working so well within this. here's what we can't do. look at china, how filthy it is. look at russia, look at india. it's filthy. the air is filthy. the paris accord, i took us out because we were going to have to spend trillions of dollars and we were treated very unfairly. when they put us in there, they did a great disservice. they were going to take away our businesses. i will not sacrifice tens of millions of jobs, thousands and thousands of companies because of the paris accord. it was so unfair. china doesn't kick in until 2030. russia goes back to a low standard. and we kicked in right away. it would have been -- it would

have destroyed our businesses. so we have done an incredible job environmentally. we have the cleanest air, the cleanest water and the best carbon emission standards that we've seen in many, many years. >> vice president biden. >> we haven't destroyed our industries. >> vice president biden, two minutes to you uninterrupted. >> climate change, global warming is an existential threat to humanity. we have a moral obligation to deal with it. we're told by all the leading scientists in the world we don't have much time. we're going to pass the point of no return within the next 8-10 years. four more years of this man eliminating all the regulations that were put in by us to clean up the climate, to clean up, to limit emissions, will put it in position where we're going to be in real trouble. here's where we have a great opportunity. i was able to get both all the environmental organizations as well as labor, the people

worried about jobs, to support my climate plan. it will create millions of new good-paying jobs. we're going to invest in, for example, 50,000 charging stations on our highways so that we can own the electric car market in the future. in the meantime, china has done that. we're going to be in a position where we're going to see to it where we're going to take 4 million existing buildings and 2 million existing homes and retro fit them so they don't leak as much energy saving hundreds of millions of barrels of oil in the process and create a significant number of jobs. by the way, the whole idea of what this is all going to do, it's going to create millions of jobs and it's going to clean the environment. our health and our jobs are at stake. that's what's happening. right now, by the way, wall street firms indicated that my plan, my plan will in fact

create 18.6 million jobs, 7 million more than his. this is from wall street. and i'll create $1 trillion more in economic growth than his proposal does. not on climate, just on the economy. >> president trump? >> they came out and said very strongly $6500 will be taken away from families under his plan, that his plan is an economic disaster. if you look at what he wants to do, you know, if you look at his plan, you know who developed it? aoc plus three. they know nothing about the climate. i mean, she's got a good line of stuff, but she knows nothing about the climate. and they're all hopping through hoops for aoc plus three. look, a real plan costs $100 trillion. if we had the best year in the history of our country for 100 years, we would not even come close to a number like that. when he says buildings, they want to take buildings down because they want to make bigger

windows into smaller windows. as far as they're concerned if you had no window, it would be a lovely thing. this is the craziest plan that anybody has ever seen. this wasn't done by smart people. this wasn't done by anybody, frankly. they want to spend $100 trillion. that's their real number. he's trying to say it was six. it's $100 trillion. they want to knock down buildings and build new buildings with little, tiny, small windows and many other things. >> we're running out of time and we have a lot more questions. let's hear from the vice president. i have a number of more questions. >> i don't know where he comes up with these numbers. $100 trillion? give me a break. this plan is endorsed by every major environmental group and every labor group. labor, because they know the future lies, the future lies in us being able to breathe and they know there are good jobs in

getting us there. by the way, the fastest-growing industry in america is the electric -- excuse me, solar energy and wind. he thinks wind causes cancer, windmills. it's the fastest-growing jobs and they paid good prevailing wages, $45-50 an hour. we can grow and we can be cleaner if we go through that proposal. >> president trump. >> we are energy independent for the first time. we don't need all of these countries that we had to fight war over because we needed their energy. we are energy independent. i know more about wind than you do. it's extremely expensive, kills all the birds. it's very intermittent, got a lot of problems. they happened to make the windmills in both germany and china. and the fumes coming up, if you're a believer in carbon emission, if fumthe fumes comino make these massive windmills is

more than natural gas. i love solar but solar doesn't quite have it yet. it's not powerful yet to really run our big, beautiful factories that we need to compete with the world. >> false. >> it's all a pipe dream. you know what we'll do? we're going to have the greatest economy in the world. if you want to kill the economy, get rid of your oil industry. what about fracking? >> let me allow vice president biden to respond. >> i never said i opposed fracking. >> you said it on tape. >> show the tape. put it on your website. >> i'll put it on. >> the fact of the matter is he's flat lying. >> would you rule out banning fracking? >> i do rule out banning fracking. the answer, we need other industries to transition to get to ultimately a complete zero emissions by 2025. what i will do with fracking over time is make sure we can

capture the emissions from the fracking, capture the emissions from gas. we can do that and we can do that by investing money. it's a transition to that. >> i have one more question. >> excuse me. he was against fracking. he said it. i will show that to you tomorrow. >> go ahead. >> i am against fracking. until he got the nomination, went to pennsylvania. then he said, but you know what, pennsylvania, he'll be against it very soon, because his party is totally against it. >> fracking on federal land, i said. >> let me ask this final question in this section and then i want to move onto our final section. president trump, people of color are much more likely to live near oil refineries and chemical plants. in texas, there are families who worry the plants near them are making them sick. your administration has rolled back regulations on these kinds of facilities. why should these families give you another four years in office? >> the families we're talking about are employed heavily and they're making a lot of money, more money than they've ever

made. if you look at the kind of numbers that we produce for hispanic or black or asian, it's nine times greater, the percentage gain than it was under in three years than it was under eight years of the two of them, to put it nicely. nine times more. now, somebody lives -- i have not heard the numbers or the statistics that you're saying, but they're making a tremendous amount of money economically. we saved it and i saved it again a number of months ago when oil was crashing because of the pandemic. we saved it. we got saudi arabia, mexico and russia to cut back, way back. we saved our oil industry. now it's very vibrant again. everybody has very inexpensive gasoline. >> vice president biden, your response? then we're going to have a final question for both of you. >> my response is that those people live on what's called fence lines. he doesn't understand that.

they live near chemical plants that, in fact, pollute, chemical plants and oil plants and refineries that pollute. i used to live near that when i was growing up in claymont, delaware. when my mom would get in the car with the first frost to drive into school, turn on the windshield wipers, there would be an oil slick on the window. that's why so many people in my state were dying and getting cancer. it doesn't matter what you're paying them. it matters how you keep them safe, what do you do. you impose restrictions on the pollutants coming out of those fence line communities. >> okay. i have one final question. >> would you close down the oil industry? >> i'd have a transition from the oil industry, yes. >> oh. there's a big statement. >> i would stop -- >> why would you do that? >> because the oil industry pollutes significantly. >> i see. >> here's the deal. if you let me finish the

statement, because it has to replace by renewable energy over time, over time. i'd stop giving the oil industry federal subsidies. he won't give federal subsidies to solar and wind. why are we giving it to the oil industry? >> we actually do for some lar a solar. >> one final question, mr. president. >> he's going to destroy the oil industry. remember that, texas, remember that, oklahoma. >> i have to get to the final question. vice president biden. >> he takes everything out of context, but the point is, look, we have to move toward a net zero emissions. the first place to do that by the year 2035 is in energy production. by 2050 totally. >> one final question. no we're finished. let's go to our final question. >> -- join the paris accord and

make china abide by what they agree to. >> this first question does go to you, president trump. imagine this is your inauguration day. what will you say in your address to americans who did not vote for you? you'll each have one minute. >> we have to make a country totally successful as it was prior to the plague coming in from china. now we're rebuilding it and we're doing record numbers, 11.4 million jobs in a short period of time, et cetera. but i will tell you -- go back. before the plague came in, just before, i was getting calls from people who were not normally people that would call me. they wanted to get together. we had the best black unemployment numbers in the history of our country. hispanic, women, asian, people with diplomas, with no diplomas, m.i.t. graduates, number one in the class, everybody had the best numbers. you know what? the other side wanted to get together.

they wanted to unify. success is going to bring us together. we are on the road to success. but i'm cutting taxes and he wants to raise everybody's taxes and he wants to put new regulations on everything. he will kill it. if he gets in, you will have a depression the likes of which you've never seen. your 401(k)'s will go to hell and it will be a very, very sad day for this country. >> vice president biden, same question to you. what will you say during your inaugural address to americans who did not vote for you? >> i will say i'm an american president. i represent all of you, whether you voted for me or against me, and i'm going to make sure you're represented. i'm going to give you hope. we're going to choose science over fiction. we're going to choose hope over fear. we're going to choose to move forward because we have enormous opportunities to make things better. we can grow this economy. we can deal with the systemic racism. at the same time we can make sure that our economy is being run and moved and motivated by

clean energy, creating millions of new jobs. that's the fact. that's what we're going to do. i'm going to say as i said in the beginning, what is on the ballot here is the character of this country, decency, honor, respect, treating people with dignity, making sure that everyone has an even chance. i'm going to make sure you get that. you haven't been getting it the last four years. >> all right. i want to thank you both for a very robust hour and a half, a fantastic debate, really appreciate it. president trump, former vice president joe biden. thank you to belmont university for hosting us tonight. most importantly, thank you to those watching tonight. election day is november 3rd. don't forget to vote. thank you, everyone, and have a great night. [ applause ] >> thank you. >> the last of the presidential debates is history.

our cameras will stay on this view of the debate venue as their spouses join them on stage. everyone there has been told to follow the coronavirus protocols. the first couple, of course, have both had the illness. and the most urgent topic of our times led off tonight as kristin welker pointed out, we have 40,000 americans hospitalized tonight. the president, though, went back to his standard themes and did not digress. quote, it will go away. quote, we're rounding the corner. quote, it is going away. and then when he said, we're learning to live with it, joe biden scored his first rhetorical points of the evening when he said, in fact, the opposite was true. quote, we're dying with it. vice president biden was accused of -- and this is still a puzzler, of selling pillows and sheets. we're trying to run that one down. the president repeated what he

often says, no one's been tougher on russia, all evidence to the contrary. about his taxes, he said those were prepaid. there were a lot of echo chamber references, a lot of references that rally audiences would get and right wing media might get, but a national audience not read up on all of it might not. so we heard about the phony witch hunt in his words. we heard about they spied on his campaign, erroneously. there are facts that should not go uncorrected even at this initial point. president obama did not tell donald trump we were going to war with north korea. donald trump's tax returns were not poured over by the mueller investigation, as we thought and were led to believe at the timeout contemporaneously. biden at one point felt the need to remind the incumbent that he was running against him, joe

biden. and the president's words, and i'll be curious to hear other analysts, seem to harken back to the era of the escalator in many ways when he ranked himself with lincoln for what he's done for people of color in this country, joe biden later pounced on that. and so ends the final debate a dozen days out, trump against biden, more hunter biden than joe at times, but a biden nonetheless. as i toss to my colleagues, to rachel, nicole and joy, i would only add a personal note. somebody owes our colleague kristin welker an apology. take it away. >> yeah. she's owed an apology by the president, who attacked her over and over and over again heading into this event tonight trying to work the refs, trying to intimidate her. clearly kristin welker was not

intimidated. she is owed an apology. but i think she is owed congratulations by the country. i think if there was a clear winner from this debate tonight, i would argue it was, in fact, kristin welker, who did an incredibly professional, cogent, coherent job. i realize our bar is low. this is like, you know, going to go see a concert. you're like, wow, somebody hit the snare drum once and it made a sound. we were so excited it was actually a debate between two people where they talked about policy and had arguments and you could understand every word of what they were saying and there was very little talking over each other. i mean, it was a functional debate and one that involved donald trump, which kristin welker just broke the space/time con titinuum continuum. maybe that's the greatest take-away tonight. i want to hear from you guys desperately how you thought this went overall. i will say the format and the

moderation was a very good success. before we get to much distance between us and what we just heard, in addition to the lies that brian just singled out there and kudos to him for doing so quickly, i do think there were a number of lies that are potentially dangerous to leave hanging out there for the american people specifically about covid. i just want to highlight a couple of those. the president did say tonight, again, that there is a cure for coronavirus. there is not a cure for coronavirus. every time the president says that, he is misleading the american people in a way that is potentially very dangerous. if people are calibrating the riskiness of their behavior based on how serious it will be if they get infected, the president telling you a cure is something that could kill you, because there is no cure. he says it over and over again. it is not true. he said the u.s. mortality rate is lower than almost any other country. that's not true. we have one of the worst rates in the country. president trump said he's been

congratulated by many countries on what we've been able to do. we have the most covid on earth and the most citizens dead. anybody who's congratulating him on that, doesn't mean it in a good way. the president also said that we are rounding the corner, it's going away, we are rounding the bend, rounding the turn, the spikes and surges will all soon be gone. there's no sign of that whatsoev whatsoever. in fact, it looks like our country is heading into a third peak that will be higher than any other peak so far. that means more people sick, more people spreading it, more people in the hospital and ultimately more of us dead. the president told a lot of lies about covid. if there's no reason the military families gave it to him. i don't know why he keeps saying that. i don't know why he says that young people are of no concern if they get infected. the president saying tonight that the transtransmittal rates

the teachers is very low. saying don't worry, the kids won't give it to you, the president is just flat-out making that up and it's potentially dangerous. the president trying to give the impression that it's only states with democratic governors that have problems right now completely ignoring the states with the highest coronavirus rates in the country right now. the worst covid outbreak on earth right now is in the state of north dakota, which is not run by a democrat. neither is tony fauci a democrat. i know there's a lot that the president said that was wrong tonight. i feel like the covid ones are just dangerous and we have to get to them right away. nicole? >> listen, i think that trump has benefitted by the fact that expectations for him tonight were that he could finish his sentence and not leave. let me grade this debate by the old fashioned standards. joe biden won this debate

running away. all the lies you singled out were in the first 15 minutes of an hour and a half long debate. in the old days, one lie meant you lost. one lie meant you spent the next week in the spin room defending the one lie and saying ining wt really mean to do that. daniel dale who's been tracking trump's lies wrote this, an avalanche of lying even by donald trump standards. let me tell you on planet earth, just the big gut punch from donald trump is i don't know a person who doesn't find the child separation policy infuriating. i remember where i was when you started to cry on television. it still makes me cry. i remember where i was when i first heard the pro publica tape of children wailing at a detention center and i happen to know multiple trump officials who are today right now in a desperate attempt to repair

their reputations because of any association with this policy. that's what's happening on planet earth. on the planet that guy lives on, donald trump, this is the answer. the coyotes did it. the coyotes didn't do it. the child separation policy had in the letter of the law the physical separation. we learned in an ig report which leaked a couple years ago from doj ig mr. horowitz that children who were breast-feeding were physically separated from their parents. that's the horror of the trump administration. >> he said they were all very well taken care of. all three of us gasped when he said they were very well taken care of. >> i went to one of the places where they held children who had come unaccompanied. they were basically in a prison camp. it looked like a literal prison

camp. i had nightmares myself of having looked into the eyes of these little kids who didn't know who we were, they didn't know if we were there to steal them, to help them, to save them. we weren't allowed to talk to them other than being able to s say, you couldn't ask them any questions. you'd get thrown out. the fear and the terror in the place where they slept which were bunks that looked like military barrack bunks. there was one little child who had drawn a picture that essentially looked like the crucifixion. these were little kids. the idea they're well taken care of, the people who ran that place actually opposed the policy. they didn't even approve of the policy. there were only ten medical beds there. if covid broke out there, there's going to be a lot of kids that got sick. they even said it was an abomination to have it. and they at the time told us and jacob soboroff was there as well. i specifically asked, one of my

questions was how are you going to reunite those kids with their parents? they said we have an a number on the child and an a number on the parent. that was a lie. that was a lie. we now know from jacob's reporting, from lots of other reported i reportings they lied. they never had a plan to give these kids back. they took breast-feeding kids from their parents and never had a plan to get them back. >> we learned tonight that the president apparently didn't realize that child separation, taking the parents away from their kids meant taking the parents away from their kids, not taking the kids away from coyotes. >> here's a reason to have trump revealed as so heartless is such a gut punch. every parent, man, woman, older, younger can relate to the terror of losing your kid at the grocery store for three minutes. yes, these are children that the united states government in the name of the trump policy

tortured and potentially destroyed any sense of peace for the rest of their lives. >> yeah. because he was name checked, let's bring jacob soboroff. he's written the seminal book on this policy. jacob, what we're talking about in terms of our visceral reactions of that moment in the debate, help us put that in context in terms of the facts here. i was very struck by the president saying at that moment in the debate, this is the way he phrased it. he said, we're trying very hard to find parents for these kids. is the president right about that? is the trump administration doing that? >> no. and i'll go with that first, rachel. the 545 kids that we reported and everyone reported this week from a court filing that are still separated, those are parents of children, the government literally cannot find them. they were warned they would not be able to find them. these families have been separated for over three years in some instances.

they are literally going door to door in central america in order to try to locate them. kristin asked a very pointed question i think two or three times, which was do you have a plan to reunite them. the president didn't answer that question. the other thing i want to say is i was one of the reporters that i guess the president mentioned without naming me. they invited me to go to the epicenter of this policy in the mcallen border patrol processing station. he said they were very well taken care of. that was not the case at all. what i saw there was little children sitting on concrete floors covered by mylar blankets supervised by security contractors in a watch tower. it makes me sick every time i recall it. and they called this torture. it's the u.n. definition of torture. the american academy of pediatrics called it government sanctioned child abuse. and the president of the united

states, i guess interpreted that as children being well taken care of. no one else ever did this, rachel. the biden administration didn't do this. this was uniquely a trump administration policy. >> jacob, thank you for that and putting facts around that framing. i will say candidate versus can- i mean kristen was so in control of the debate that they weren't going after each other a lot, but that moment where biden -- you could see the ire arise and biden called it a criminal, for me it wasn't the most rutorquely punchy line but it was the thing that landed the most strongly to me of the entire night. >> the other line biden i think landed really strongly was anybody who's responsible for 240,000 deaths should not be president of the united states. when donald trump said we're learning to live with covid, and he said, no, people are learning to die with it. i thought that was another strong line.

this is on race. donald trump is now trying to recycle the super predator lie and use it against joe biden. joe biden never said super predator. yes, he did spearhead the crime bill. but let's just remember there are a lot of african-american elected officials including in congress who voted for the crime bill and who wanted the crime bill. the context was the crack epidemic was tearing through black communities, and black pastors were demanding a bill. he put that bill together that also included an assault weapons ban. it also included the violence against women act. let's just remember the context back in that era, i remember being in new york and there was a lot of crime perpetrated within the black community, which is why joe biden ended up doing that bill. >> it was a huge fight. and biden also says now it was a mistake and we're fighting to undo the damage of it. >> during that time donald trump talking about super predators -- in the year 2000 donald trump

said he was going to run for president. this is what he wrote in his book, this is donald trump, a perpetrator is never a victim, he's nothing more than a predator. a life is a life, and if you criminally take an innocent life you better be prepared to forfeit your own. my only complaint is lethal injection is too comfortable a way to go. criminals are often returned to society because of forgiving judges. this has to stop. we need to hold judges more accountable. the rest of us need to rethink prisons and punishment. the next time you hear someone saying there are too many people in prison ask them how many thugs they're willing to relocate to their neighborhood. the answer, none. page 106 to 107. he was actually further to the right on crime than joe biden ever has been in his entire life. one more and i will stop. >> no, you don't have to stop. keep going. >> this pigs in the blanket frying like bacon lie like black lives matter has been galling me since people on the right

started throwing it out there. they're basing that on a march for eric garner in new york, 40,000 people marched because of the outrage of the choking death of eric garner. i walked almost the entire length of that march. i faded to the back sometimes, i went to the front sometimes. you can see it on my instagram. because i was posting pictures the entire day i was there. not one person chanted that pigs in a blanket line. there was an offshoot separate group of people -- nobody knows who they are. i know a whole lot of people in blacks lives matter, who started it and were leaders in it. not a single person knows who they were that started that chant. they were never connected to the march. there's absolutely zero, zero evidence that black lives matter has ever pushed for anything violent, pushed for anything violent to happen to police. black lives matter is about one thing. stop killing black people just

because you pull them over for a parking parking violation or moving violation. for him to traffic that again tonight was not only desperate -- it was not only desperate but also stupid because he also wants black men to vote for him. i hate to break it to you, donald trump, but black men and an extreme majority, okay, would also like to not be killed by police and would also like to have police reform and to have police not be able to kill a breonna taylor and walk away and get away with it. so this lie about black lives matter has to end and end. >> let's keep this conversation going, though, and bring into the conversation someone who's been a major player on this subject for years. reverend al sharpton president of the action network, host of politics nation here on msnbc. reverend sharpton, thinking of you tonight as we're trying to unpack this part of the debate. what is your reaction to those

exchanges joy is describing here? >> that was never said. you had some offshoot groups that said that, but that was clearly not the case. i think what upset me more in '94 i was one of the few out there marching against the crime bill and against senator biden. and many of the black leaders were for the crime bill. most of the congressional black caucus was. it was a reaction to that football player who died of an overdose of crack, and it was an overreaction we've got to do something about it. so joe biden has said it was a mistake, and he was not alone. there were many black leadership that were with him on now. he's subsequently for many years saying this was a mistake and has worked with president obama.

i think the key thing tonight is when he said and i was in the room when they started working on community censuses. joe biden sat next to me in the meeting and he said to me tonight give me the amount of people you've gotten out of jail, trump, with your bill that you claim that you're doing. he said i can name 20. trump couldn't name any. they've made 1,000 people go home. they cannot quantify it. they throw out these names and numbers but they can't quantify it. and to this day he's saying he wants a national stop and frisk policy. his personal lawyer is rudy giuliani, the architect of stop and frisk which has been proven in court to be racist. so for him to sit up there and try to attack on criminal justice when he's advocated policies, he had the head of the police union that defended the choking of eric garndndener, yo

can't have it both ways, and i think we need to be clear, yes we oppose biden in '94. biden has come to terms with that. trump is still advocating those policies, and they never address that conversation that black parents have to have with black kids. >> reverend al sharpton, head of the action network, an absolutely priceless contributor especially on nights like this. rev, thank you very much. i will say that we also saw i think significant offense from biden tonight on trump's financial ties to china, on russian disinformation. i love that moment where biden was like am i going to do this, i shouldn't do it, okay giuliani -- and goes in on russian disinformation. >> and you kind of held your

breath like whoa, which giuliani. do you know what he did do, though? when kristen gave him an opportunity, and when you're prepping a candidate or incumbent president for a debate you are just hoping for these opportunities when they just hand you the floor and say speak to black moms and dads, tell them not to be afraid. you know what he did? they had decided he had zilch, nada, nothing so that was when he went after biden on his son. he had nothing. >> we didn't talk a lot during this one. this is chance -- >> you could actually hear them. >> but every time that trump tried to launch the biden attack i think we all were looking at each other like -- if you're not immersed in right wing media -- >> and we're cable hosts. >> and you don't know the details. >> no one knows the details of

these conspiracy theories. >> nobody on the fence. and here's the feeling i got from watching trump. his campaign knows that the strategic imperative is to take some biden votes. he didn't need to come out there and bang the laptop, whatever that even means to him. he needed to get out there and make an argument he's the best person to reopen main streets across every american county. he didn't utter a word about main streets across every american county. joe biden did, and i thought that's where he comes -- >> he said the question at hand because trump is the incumbent is what has donald trump done, what thing has he done to deserve re-election, and he didn't answer that question tonight because all he did was attack joe biden on nefarious conspiracy theories and whine

about hillary clinton. >> and mocked him for doing it. american people who are about to decide whether you get to live in that nice house any longer. >> -- talking to the voters who are hurting in pain. >> what a scam. we're going to hand it back to our friend and colleague brian williams tonight. brian? >> with thanks to my friends, rachel, nicolle, and joy, thank you all so much. and good evening. once again welcome to a special expanded debate night edition of "the 11th hour." get comfortable. we'll be at this for the next two hours. day 1,372 of of the trump administration. a dozen days remain until the next election, and now the final debate of this cycle is history. tonight's debate was nowhere near